Canadian vendor Nortel has delayed the next stage of its fire sale until later this week, giving potential bidders for its Optical Networking and Carrier Ethernet businesses and extra few days to get bids together.

The auction was previously scheduled to take place last week, but will now take place on Tuesday of this week.

This development suggests that carrier network specialist Ciena, which forged an agreement with Nortel to acquire the exiting firm’s optical networking and carrier Ethernet assets in October, has some competition.

The assets are owned by Nortel’s Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN) business and include the firm’s long-haul optical transport portfolio, metro optical Ethernet switching and transport solutions, Ethernet transport, aggregation and switching technology, multiservice SONET/SDH product families, and network management software products.